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Comment by willsr | Hacker News Reader

Hmm - cool project. Don't want to be a buzzkill, but copyright?

Should probably remove the assets to avoid a takedown.

> Includes assets and graphics extracted from the original SimCity 2000 Special Edition CD. These assets are NOT covered by the GNU General Public License used by this project and are copyright EA / Maxis. I'm including these assets in the hope that because the game has been made freely available at various points in time by EA, and because it's 24 years old as of publishing this project that no action will be taken. Long story short, please don't sue me! Long term, I plan to add functionality to extract assets from the original game files within this project.

That looks like thin ice. Basically they're hoping to remain too small for EA to bother with.

IIRC, the usual workaround for asset licensing is to make an automated extractor for people who have the original game. This buys you time while you work on drop-in replacements.

Certainly bad practice. If developers want automation it's better to suggested to download assets (or even do it automatically) from Web Archive. They're exempt from DMCA and it's trustworthy source.

https://archive.org/details/SimCity2000_Special_Edition_Maxi...

I actually got 7/9th's of the way through doing this for the FMOD dependency of http://www.bay12games.com/ww1medic.

Specifically: http://web.archive.org/web/20070806010730/http://www.fmod.or...

Frankly, I'm somewhat amazed that this is on archive.org. They may have a DMCA exception, but it's a bad look considering the game is still actively being sold on GoG and under copyright.

I wouldn't argue about this exact file since it's might be a bit more recent, but that game is about 25 years old. Do you seriously think keeping it on archive.org is bad?

It's very likely to not work on modern systems anyway (dosbox will work of course) and version from GOG likely wouldn't be installable on let's say DOS or Windows 95. And there is plenty of people who might want to run old games on some ancient PC for personal fun or for museum-like purposes.

Another option for open source projects it's to just use demo version which is 100% legit way to get assets. Though it's not always possible because some demo versions don't contain whole assets that fully-featured engine would depend on.

As an alternative, perhaps an artist could create new free assets for use with the engine, which is what happened with OpenTTD.

And as happened in OpenRedAlert and OpenDune.

Remaking sprites and game assets in a more open format - while also supporting the original game assets.

OpenTTD did this, eventually. But for years it used the original assets. But it was your responsibility to get the game.

This is something I'm actively working on - I wanted to get an initial release out there but didn't expect this much attention so quickly! Hoping to have something out there to parse out the original game assets within a day or two.

I immediately cloned it for this reason just in case. Wanted to make sure I didn't miss the opportunity to play this game again in case they did a take down. Still have the old games, but I haven't had the willpower to learn how to use Wine.

Sim City 2000 is on GOG, where it is playable on modern computers. They also sell Sim City 3000 and 4, without DRMs.

> Still have the old games, but I haven't had the willpower to learn how to use Wine.

Maybe check PlayOnLinux? It provides a front-end to Wine and automatizes game installations via custom scripts. Basically, you select your game in a list, it installs it, then puts a launcher on your desktop.

https://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Most SimCity 2000 discs come with the DOS version, the Windows 3.11 version, and the Windows 95 version. The DOS version runs just fine under DOSBox if you don't want to get into Wine too deeply.

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